SARAH FERGUSON, PRESENTER: Richard Marles, welcome to 7.30.
RICHARD MARLES, DEFENCE MINISTER: Good evening, Sarah.
SARAH FERGUSON: Defence Personnel Minister Matt Keogh said today that from 1 January 2025, permanent residents from Five Eyes countries and I quote, “any other countries”, will be eligible to join the Australian Defence Force. Did he get that bit wrong?
RICHARD MARLES: Firstly, from the 1st of July, we will be opening up entry into the Australian Defence Force for New Zealand citizens who have been permanent residents for a year and then from the 1st of January that will be extended to Five Eyes countries.
That’s the decision that we’ve taken but we do have an eye beyond that to the Pacific, really, and a precondition of all of this will be, having been a permanent resident for 12 months at least and obviously passing all the security checks which would apply to any Australian who joins the Australian Defence Force.
So that’s the decision that we’ve taken and it’s actually a significant Rubicon that is being crossed by government policy today, but we are working this out in a very kind of slow and considered pathway and right now it is New Zealand, and it is Five Eyes from the beginning of next year.
SARAH FERGUSON: Slow but considered pathway. He said any other country, so did he get that wrong?
RICHARD MARLES: We’ve made clear that a precondition which is what Minister Keogh has been talking about is that you have permanent residency for a year in order to qualify for this but Minister Keogh has spoken this afternoon, made it really clear that what we are doing is what I’ve just described, which is that we are doing New Zealanders from the 1st of July and Five Eyes from the 1st of January.
SARAH FERGUSON: It’s hard to imagine anything more significant in this announcement that you are making today that it is absolutely crystal clear who this will be targeted at.
RICHARD MARLES: And it is.
SARAH FERGUSON: Well, are you ruling out permanent residents from other countries, not Pacific countries?
RICHARD MARLES: That’s just not on the agenda so that isn’t happening. What we are talking about is New Zealand on the 1st of July, the rest of the Five Eyes from the 1st of January.
We have an eye to the Pacific beyond that to be clear and that is the pathway that we are walking down. I know that there is all sorts of scare campaigns going but they are nothing other than that.
This is New Zealand, Five Eyes, we have in a more medium view of the Pacific and that is what we are seeking to do here but the reason we are doing this is because there has been a challenge in terms of recruitment and retention in the Australian Defence Force.
We need to turn that around and we are but it’s not just turning it around, we are looking to grow the Defence Force through to 2040 and in order to do that we do need to be looking at a wider pool of people and this is something that other countries do.
SARAH FERGUSON: Yes indeed. Let me just want to stay with Australia for the moment. The shadow defence minister, Andrew Hastie, described it today as a half-baked idea. Were all of the details approved by Cabinet and if they were, how did Matt Keogh allow ambiguity to creep in?
RICHARD MARLES: Well, this is a crystal-clear position. I’ve just articulated it, and Minister Keogh did so this afternoon as well.
I mean in terms of the shadow minister, last year Andrew Hastie was talking about the fact that we do need to be opening up the Defence Force to other citizens and that if the citizens were coming here and willing to die for Australia or if immigrants were willing to do that, we should be looking at them coming into our Defence Force.
So Andrew Hastie has gone to this place himself without much definition. This is a very clear step down this path in the way in which I have articulated it this evening and that has been repeated by Minister Keogh through the day and it is a very important step for the government.
SARAH FERGUSON: Let me ask you this, the opposition wants to know, as I’m sure everyone does, what kind of vetting checks will be conducted. Have those details been discussed yet?
RICHARD MARLES: Yeah, and it is exactly the same vetting which occurs for Australian citizens and that was made clear in our announcements today as well.
So essentially the terms on which people would join and participate in the Australian Defence Force will be as if they were Australian. So that means all of same vetting checks to join and then exactly the same return of service obligations once they are members of the Australian Defence Force because our return of service obligations reflect the training which is invested in our service men and women and that’s the same training that would be invested in these people.
And I should add what we would be seeking is that those who join become Australian citizens within 90 days, within three months and so that’s an important part of this proposal as well.
SARAH FERGUSON: And in terms of those people who will be fast tracked to citizenship, as you just mentioned, what exactly will their obligation be? How much time for example would they have to serve. What are the reserve obligations, reverse obligations, sorry?
RICHARD MARLES: Exactly the same for an Australian citizen.
SARAH FERGUSON: And what are they?
RICHARD MARLES: Well, they vary is the answer to that question but to give you what our return of service obligations are about, you can think about the Australian Defence Force in some respects as a training organisation.
We invest in people and train a whole lot of very unique skills which requires time and cost and energy in terms of doing that and when we do that what there is is then a return of service obligation on the people who have been provided those skills and that obligation varies throughout the Defence Force depending on what skills have been invested in you.
So, you know, a fast jet pilot will have a longer return of service obligation than a lower skilled person in the Defence Force.
But in terms of what we have announced today, exactly that regime of return of service obligations would apply to these people because exactly the same training will apply to these people and so in that sense all the security checks going in are the same, on all the return of service obligations are the same but what we are doing is opening up the field of who we can seek to have join the Australian Defence Force and we know this is an important step down this path.
SARAH FERGUSON: Can you reassure the audience that those vetting checks, that you are able to do those vetting checks for citizens from other countries in exactly the same way, with exactly the same certainty and thoroughness that you can do for Australians?
RICHARD MARLES: Well, the answer to that is yes, meaning if you just look at Australians there are people who are easier to check their history than others and that forms part of the basis on which you can be accepted into the Australian Defence Force and you are not accepted into the Australian Defence Force unless you are able to complete a thorough security check and the same threshold would apply to any of these non-citizens.
SARAH FERGUSON: How do you make the ADF attractive to non-citizens when Australians are not joining in sufficient numbers?
RICHARD MARLES: We need to be making the ADF more attractive to Australians as well and we are doing that and we’ve improved the housing offer for example, there is retention bonuses that we’ve announced and there are a suite of measures that we have taken which have actually had a significant impact on reducing the separation rate and we are starting to turn around the recruitment rate.
But I think what we are seeking to do is to enlarge the pool of people and we do attract, clearly, we attract Australians to serve in our Defence Force.
We believe this will be an attractive offer for those in the first instance, New Zealand permanent residents, New Zealand citizens who we will be offering this to.
In time, I think if you do project forward and we have got to step this out and it will take time, but as we look to the Pacific obviously, it will be a particularly attractive step to join the Australian Defence Force in their circumstances but there is a lot more work which needs to be engaged in to get to that point.
But this is the path we must walk down because we do need to open up the field of who can serve in the Australian Defence Force and if I just could finish the answer I was giving a little earlier, this is a Rubicon that has been crossed by other countries.
Britain recruit out of Fiji, out of Nepal, the Gurkhas. The US recruit out of Micronesia, of course, the French have the French Foreign Legion. We have armies and defence forces of like-minded countries who walk down this path.
I think if we want to increase the Defence Force which is our objective through to 2040 then we are going to need to open that up in this way, but we are going do it in a very slow, methodical and considered way.
SARAH FERGUSON: Defence Minister Richard Marles, thank you very much indeed for joining us.
RICHARD MARLES: Thanks Sarah.